Bob Dylan’s ‘Through the Open Window’ Explores Revealing Early Work: Review
by Jeff Burger
Though Bob Dylan’s Bootleg Series began in 1991 and has now embraced well over 50 discs, it is only with this 18th volume that it is getting around to the first chapter of its subject’s story. And what a chapter it is.
Granted, the period covered by Through the Open Window: The Bootleg Series, Vol. 18, predates much of Dylan’s finest work. And even the great stuff here (of which there is plenty) often appears in demos, outtakes, home recordings and nightclub and coffeehouse performances that lack the relative polish of his famous studio LPs. But this package, like the rest of the Bootleg anthologies, isn’t intended to be anything like a best-of collection. Instead, it aims to dig beneath the surface and hold a magnifying glass to Dylan’s creative process.
This eight-CD set does that as well as anything in the series. Its 139 tracks include 59 previously unreleased performances and another 37 that are extremely hard to find elsewhere. It comes with a well-illustrated 124-page hardcover book that incorporates discographic information and lengthy notes by author Sean Wilentz.
[The Deluxe edition—featuring 139 tracks including 48 never-before released performances, as well as 38 “super-rare” cuts—is available in the U.S./worldwide here and in the U.K. here; and as a highlights edition on 4-LPs or 2-CDs, available in the U.S. here and in the U.K. here. All three editions are available in Canada here.]
Disc one begins with a few very early Minnesota recordings. In the oldest, from 1956, a 15-year-old Dylan amateurishly but enthusiastically mouths the words to Shirley and Lee’s then-popular “Let the Good Times Roll.” There’s also a 1959 performance of a rudimentary self-penned obscurity called “I Got a New Girl.” (“Well, I got a new girl, she says she’s my one/But my new girl, she won’t come home/Come on now, baby, say you’ll be mine always/And I’ll be your one for eternity.”)
Of the 40 songs on the first two CDs, all but seven date from 1961, and only 10 are Dylan originals. This was a time when he was busy soaking up folk and blues influences, so we hear covers of tunes by artists such as Woody Guthrie, Rev. Gary Davis and Blind Lemon Jefferson. Some are collaborative efforts with Dylan’s Greenwich Village folk contemporaries, including Carolyn Hester, Dave Van Ronk, Jim Kweskin and future Blues Project guitarist Danny Kalb.
Can you detect hints of greatness in these recordings? Mostly just in retrospect, though Dylan does project a large personality and, on one of the few originals (“Talkin’ Bear Mountain Picnic Massacre Blues”), a sense of humor.
On discs three and four, all from 1962, original material becomes predominant. These are still early times, however. Banjo player Bob Yellin introduces Dylan to one audience as “a fellow who’s been around the New York area for about a year. He also performs in various coffeehouses.”
More than half the songs that ended up on Dylan’s eponymous debut LP are on these two discs, including early versions of “You’re No Good,” “Man of Constant Sorrow,” “Fixin’ to Die” (a duet with Van Ronk), “Gospel Plow,” “Baby Let Me Follow You Down,” “See That My Grave Is Kept Clean” and the record’s two originals, “Talkin’ New York” and “Song to Woody.” Also featured are a handful of covers of songs by artists such as Hank Williams, Jimmie Rodgers and Robert Johnson, and more early samples of Dylan’s humor (“Talkin’ John Birch Paranoid Blues” and “I Shall Be Free”).
Finally, there are examples of the sort of political material that Dylan frequently wrote at the time but would soon stop composing. These include “The Death of Emmett Till,” “Let Me Die in My Footsteps,” “A Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall” and “Blowin’ in the Wind,” which, he informs an audience, “ain’t a protest song or anything like that, ’cause I don’t write protest songs.”
Also here are two snippets from Dylan’s radio conversation with Cynthia Gooding, in which he tells tall tales about the six years he claims he spent with a carnival. (You can find a transcript of the whole interview in this writer’s book, Dylan on Dylan: Interviews and Encounters.)
Discs five and six, all drawn from 1963 recordings, feature more of the protest songs Dylan claimed he didn’t write, among them “Oxford Town,” “Who Killed Davey Moore,” “Masters of War,” “Only a Pawn in Their Game” and “Blowin’ in the Wind,” the last two of which are from a SNCC voter registration rally in Greenwood, Mississippi. There are outtakes from The Times They Are a-Changin’, including some with significant lyrical changes, plus performances recorded at the Newport Folk Festival, the March on Washington and Forest Hills Tennis Stadium. Dylan duets at the latter venue with his then-lover, Joan Baez, who introduces him to the audience as “a phenomenal young man.”
The box culminates with discs seven and eight, which feature a remix of an entire Oct. 26, 1963, concert at New York’s Carnegie Hall. Dylan talks more to the audience here than he does in later years, and while his repartee isn’t polished, he radiates charm. His songs, moreover, are frequently stunning. They include such future classics as “With God on Our Side,” “Masters of War,” “When the Ship Comes In” and “Boots of Spanish Leather,” which he describes as a number about how “when you can’t get what you want, you have to settle for less.”
Just two years before this concert, only 53 people had been willing to pay two dollars each to see Dylan perform in Carnegie Chapter Hall, a small rehearsal room. Now, he was appearing at Carnegie’s main venue, thrilling a sold-out crowd of thousands with an all-originals 19-song set. Dylan had traveled a long way in a very short time. As we now know, he would travel a whole lot further in the years ahead.
Related: Reflections on Dylan’s early days by those who knew him
Burger wrote one of the first interview-based profiles of Bruce Springsteen to be published in a national magazine. He has interviewed many other music-world luminaries as well, including Steve Van Zandt, Roger McGuinn, John Sebastian, Wolfman Jack, Tom Waits, Foreigner’s Mick Jones, Billy Joel, Steve Forbert, Tommy James, the Righteous Brothers, Gordon Lightfoot, Deep Purple’s Tommy Bolin, and members of Steely Dan and the Marshall Tucker Band. He has also interviewed many other public figures, such as Suze Orman, Daymond John, James Carville, Donald Trump, Sir Richard Branson, F. Lee Bailey, and Cliff Robertson.
His books include Dylan on Dylan: Interviews and Encounters, Lennon on Lennon: Conversations with John Lennon, Leonard Cohen on Leonard Cohen: Interviews and Encounters, and Springsteen on Springsteen: Interviews, Speeches, and Encounters, all of which are published in the U.S. and Canada by Chicago Review Press. The books have been republished in numerous other countries.
Burger has been the editor of several periodicals, including Business Jet Traveler, from which he retired in 2024. During his 20 years at that
publication, it received more than 120 major editorial awards, including multiple wins for the world’s Best Consumer Travel Magazine in the annual Folio:Eddie competition.
Burger lives in Ridgewood, New Jersey. His wife, Madeleine Beresford, is a puppeteer and former preschool director and teacher. The couple have two grown children.
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